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ERIC Number: EJ824982
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2009-Jan
Pages: 30
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
The Perfective Past Tense in Greek Child Language
Stavrakaki, Stavroula; Clahsen, Harald
Journal of Child Language, v36 n1 p113-142 Jan 2009
This study examines the perfective past tense of Greek in an elicited production and an acceptability judgment task testing 35 adult native speakers and 154 children in six age groups (age range: 3;5 to 8;5) on both existing and novel verb stimuli. We found a striking contrast between sigmatic and non-sigmatic perfective past tense forms. Sigmatic forms (which have a segmentable perfective affix (-s-) in Greek) were widely generalized to different kinds of novel verbs in both children and adults and were overgeneralized to existing non-sigmatic verbs in children's productions. By contrast, non-sigmatic forms were only extended to novel verbs that were similar to existing non-sigmatic verbs, and overapplications of non-sigmatic forms to existing sigmatic verbs were extremely rare. We argue that these findings are consistent with dual-mechanism accounts of morphology.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A